Unreal City: Palimpsest
Posted on June 21, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized |
I was trolling Facebook today, and I came across an event called Unreal City: Palimpsest, which is a Grant MacEwan student project in conjunction with the Works festival. The show combines photography and poetry, and focuses on the urban environment and it’s many complex layers. It sounds like a damn cool project. I’ll definitely be taking a look at this one when I get a chance to head down to the Works next week. I might even attempt to go down to the Square for a little while on Saturday afternoon.
It’s a great concept for a show. The combination of photography and poetry seems natural to me. It also happens to be the nature of a major project that I’ve conceived recently. I absolutely love the exploration of the urban environment. To a large extent, that’s what I focus on in my own work. Thankfully, my photo-poetry project is a departure from my usual urban work, so I won’t feel like I’m working in the shadow of the Unreal City project.
I won’t get into too much detail, because my project is only half-formed. The concept is almost completely developed, but I haven’t actually started writing the poems or taking the photos yet, so it may change during the process. In fact, I’m still not sure if I want to take the photos first, write the poems first, or do them both at sort of the same time. I’ll figure all of that out soon enough, though.
I suspect my biggest problem, other than maybe finding a space to host the show once it’s ready to go, will be to find a model or models for the photographic part of the show. Maybe I can exploit aspiring models, or something.
What I will say about my show is that it’s likely to be my most human work to date. I like to think that there is a large element of humanity in all of my work (as well as most poetry, really), but this project will be focusing on human people in a much more explicit way than any of my previous work. At least, that’s the plan. Writing is as much about the process as it is about the final product, if not more so, so even I’m not entirely sure what this thing is going to look like after I’ve worked on it for 6 to 12 months.
Unreal City runs for the duration of the Works festival, June 22-July 04, 2007.
Comments
Leave a Reply